My Dad beat me up from as young as I remember until I beat the shit out of him with a pool cue when I was 16. Put the fucker in hospital with a broken jaw. He also beat my mother and my brother. And pissed the bed. I saw my parent's mattress regularly propped up against the radiator drying out after one of my dad's drinking sessions. And then when I came home, in a moment of need he threw not just me out on the street but all my possesions.

And now I'm expected to forget all that shit for the sake of what?

I spent 10 years perfectly happy on my own.

Why do we forgive people just because they're older?

I mean I know he's sorry now and a different person but all that leaves is an ugly wound that will never heal.

Similarly no children,though involved in bringing some up,whether previous fostering or supposed education-though Labour Party leaders,World Cup winners since 1930,various techniques as to how to avoid paying for things but still getting them etc,may or may not have been strictly what knowledge etc I was supposed to pass on,classified as lifeskills I was "loose" with the description.

Sorry about that, it was the idea of going there for Christmas that set me off.

It's funny how you can feel really fucking bitter one day, and the next feel some kind of familal warmth that overrides it all. We are creatures of our emotions and our urges most of us. Not rational beings.

It doesn't matter how much we advance our shiny toys, as a species we are psychologically a mess, a cobbled together, haphazard evolutionary amalgam of different levels of sentience culminating in a consciousness that is almost entirely beyond our control.

Almost all of the decisions made in our brains are made unconsciously and the few that we do make consciously are bound by rules we learned as children.

Didn't Patrick Moore once release a book explaining how not to pay for things? I seem to remember he told people to rub wax on the undersheet of carbon copy paper so your signature and everything else wouldn't be copied.

What he didn't explain was how you distracted the fellow from HMRC or wherever while you smeared his pad with a candle then sat back sniggering to yourself.

They seem not the type to be impressed if you point out the window and say 'Oh look there's a Supernova'.